The way the PLCB presents this data is, shall we say, unhelpful. It's just a PDF, alphabetical by company name. That's better than what they used to have, but still there's no way to sort it or make sense of it or, really, dig into it at all.

Hence GrapeAphid. Scraped PLCB data gets cleaned up and added to and made more accessible and here we are.

Beyond the raw data, all place by place and one by one, sometimes the broader set has useful things to say. One thing that becomes clear fairly quickly is these are not all little wineries representing themselves.

There are more than a few companies in this data that represent or own a number of wineries and can ship those products to you. Pennsylvania doesn't give us any way to to know which ones or what their inventory is. The state doesn't point us to their websites. It's even removed email addresses it used to provide.

One example is Distinguished Vineyards & Wine Partners which represents a handful of wineries in Oregon, California and Australia. When it appears in the PLCB's data -- it doesn't always -- it shows up as Lion Nathan USA, an old corporate name, at an address in Oregon not far from wine country, an hour or so from Portland. And that's it.

Even with the data in hand, there's so much more to explore.

As we begin to look inside the data, maybe it isn't a surprise that most of these businesses are based in California. There is no close second.

It's only become more pronounced over time. Consider June 2017. Even though there are only a handful more direct shippers now than there were then, a greater proportion are from California. And those from Pennsylvania have receded.

The counties with the most show how concentrated they can be. The top counties are in California, then Oregon, then Washington, with New York also in the picture. Pennsylvania -- the state with the second-most direct-wine-shippers -- consistently shows up for the first time at or near the bottom of the top 15 counties.

the top 15:

Napa County, California: 320Sonoma County, California: 168San Luis Obispo County, California: 47Yamhill County, Oregon: 40Santa Barbara County, California: 38Walla Walla County, Washington: 23Monterey County, California: 16Mendocino County, California: 15Yates County, New York: 13Benton County, Washington: 12Alameda County, California: 9Seneca County, New York: 7San Joaquin County, California: 7Suffolk County, New York: 7

Here's where things start to get a little more revealing. Some of the wine-shippers use the same addresses -- at times because it's an office park home to a few of them, or because the same business handles a number of different wineries.

The PLCB's old website for this data contained email addresses. The new PDF doesn't. Those email addresses made the pattern even more visible -- but that's OK. We have phone numbers, which can show us something quite similar. Several are represented at least a dozen times.

the top 12:

805-239-4502: 52

530-432-2262: 36

866-661-4190: 36

510-964-7901: 36

707-284-2828: 31

707-528-8500: 27

505-977-1010: 19

707-578-7807: 18

707-252-4725: 17

508-648-2505: 14

707-708-7640: 13

707-265-0233: 12

From the creator of Boozicorns. Another entry in the PyLCB series of Python-powered scrapers for PLCB data. Check out the code and the story behind this project on GitHub. Or just say hello.